The blue edge of midnight

Chapter 26

Richards was right about my bad habits, hospitals and gunshot wounds among them. This time I stayed at least half conscious through most of it; watched the paramedics hover over me in the ambulance, taking vital signs and pushing IVs, felt the rocking back and forth with the turns and stops and slow-downs and accelerations through every intersection, heard the siren whining and then chattering through traffic.
I was awake when they wheeled me into the E.R. of yet another hospital; saw the ugly fluorescent lights, heard the rake of curtains on steel rods, listened to the repeated questions that I could hear but could not get my throat to answer. I heard a doctor ask the paramedic if this was it.
“Yeah, the rest were dead at the scene,” he said.
I was conscious when they dug the bullet out of my thigh, heard them comment on how shallow it had penetrated into the muscle, heard the metal click into a hard plastic container, heard someone speculate on how misshapen the round was and that it must have hit something first and tumbled.
“Made a messy entrance wound, though,” I heard the doctor say. “Not nearly as clean as this old one.” And I felt his cold gloved finger touch the scar tissue on my neck.
I was awake when they x-rayed my arm, heard the metallic buzz and clack of the machine. Heard the orthopedic guy say, “Jesus, these guys didn’t try to set this in the field, did they?”
I guess I slept some then. I still did not want to close my eyes, but they must have slipped something into my blood to make me sleep.
I was in another hospital room when I awoke. Sunlight was pouring through a window and painting an obtuse rectangle of light on the wall. Hammonds was sitting in a chair at the end of the bed, looking down at his folded hands. I watched him for several minutes before I cleared my throat and spoke.
“You need me?” I said, the words coming out softer than I wanted them to.
He looked up without lifting his head and met my eyes.
“No,” he said. “Probably not anymore.”
He stayed in the chair and talked. His tie was pulled tight. His elbows rested on his knees and his hands remained folded as he talked.
They’d recovered my 9mm from the river bottom just below the dam. Forensics was doing a ballistics test and lifting prints. They had also recovered the GPS unit from my shack and printed that.
Blackman’s body was at the morgue and the preliminary cause of death was a knife wound to the throat. The M.E. had noted that the cut appeared to have been made with a blade similar in style to the one used on the Alvarezes’ dog.
Hammonds looked up at me when he said this, and this time I looked away.
“We also collected a certain piece of cutlery from the table in your, uh, home. I’ll assume you won’t mind that we run some tests on that particular piece?”
I nodded my assent. There was a long awkward silence, but Hammonds wasn’t leaving. We were both trying to smooth some still rough stones.
“We had Blackman down as a suspect for some time,” he finally said, talking into his hands. “We weren’t sure, but it was impossible to tail the guy. We couldn’t follow his movements, we couldn’t bring him out.”
I could see the investigator’s hands start to tighten and then relax in a fidgety rhythm.
“Then you came along and at first we thought we finally had an accomplice coming out of the bucket. Then it looked more like you were set up. And after the plane thing, a target. After a while, we didn’t know which side you were on but we figured you might draw somebody out.”
“Bait,” I said, with neither accusation nor surprise in my voice.
“Better if he were after you than the kids,” Hammonds said flatly.
“Even after Ashley?”
“Ashley could have been our guy. But I couldn’t bet on it.”
“So you gave him a little confidence with the press conference,” I said, trying to see his eyes.
“Sometimes,” he said, looking up with no shame, “you have to use them.”
I couldn’t tell if he meant me, the press, the system, or all of us. Hammonds finally stood up, re-tightened the knot of his tie and smoothed his jacket.
“I know you’re thinking it wasn’t worth it. You could have stayed out of it. I could have locked you up and kept you out of it. Maybe the rangers would be alive,” he said, looking too tired for a man of any age. “But he would have kept feeding on the innocents, Max.”
He reached out and offered his hand and I took it.
“Now it is over,” he said and I watched him walk out of the room.
A quiet minute after Hammonds left, Billy knocked at the door. He was followed by detectives Richards and Diaz. It was as if they were waiting for some sort of clearance from their boss.
“You’re l-looking good,” Billy said, standing at the end of the bed, cynically shaking his head.
“Good like runover dog shit,” Diaz said, putting a hand on the bed covers and smiling his big-toothed smile.
It was Richards who stepped up to my side and touched my right arm just above the IV.
“How you feeling, Freeman?” she said.
“I’m OK,” I said, looking for a brief second into her eyes. Her closeness was making me nervous. She took her hand away and cupped her elbows.
“Well, take your time lying here getting all that sweet nursing care,” Diaz said. “The press is going ape-shit out there and there’s no way to keep your name out of the public record.
“Right now you’re a surviving victim who was wounded by some psycho committing a double homicide. Hammonds isn’t even linking it up with the kid killings yet.”
I looked at Billy but he stayed silent, not willing to speculate with two cops standing there.
“There’s some reporter out there whose name is Donna. Says she knows you,” Richards said, raising an eyebrow. I shook my head. “Says she’s not really pressing, but knows you’ve got a story and she’s willing to wait for it. I know I don’t have to tell you that those are the ones to look out for.”
“In the meantime, we got a ton of paperwork to file,” Diaz said, butting in and giving me a reason to look away from his partner’s eyes.
“You find any, uh, witnesses out there?” I whispered.
“None. After you called about the rangers we moved as soon as we could. We came upriver and got to the Whaler. The second team came down from where you showed me your smashed-up canoe. They were all in night vision. Only thing they saw was Blackman’s body.”
I knew the two SWAT teams coming in from both ends was a tactic that would have been used if they thought I’d gone psycho, killed the rangers and then holed up in my shack. I didn’t say anything. It was good police work. You can’t take it personally. But even with that kind of coverage and technical advantage, Nate Brown had slipped through unseen.
“And how is Hammonds going to play Blackman’s death?” I finally asked, wondering if they even knew.
“You put up a hell of a fight, Max,” Diaz said, his cop voice back on.
I shook my head, thinking of Brown poling his skiff out over the Glades in the moonlight.
“Anyway, Hammonds has already told us to find your pilot buddy Gunther,” Richards said. “Seems he left the hospital and disappeared. But we think he might have headed home to New York State. We’ll find him. It’s not so easy to hide in the civilized world. But I guess you knew that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I knew that.”
Both of them turned to leave, but Richards hesitated at the doorway and caught me with her green gray eyes. For a heartbeat I thought I felt an old emotion start to flicker across the room and then I watched as she loosened a strand of her blond hair and tucked it in place behind her ear.
“See ya,” she said, and slipped out the door.
I heard Billy ask me if I was all right, maybe twice, before I finally turned to him as he pulled up a chair.
“You are a l-low maintenance cl-client, Max. But a high maintenance f-f-friend.”
I tightened my mouth to a grin and thanked him.
“You m-may convalesce at m-my place,” he said. “Ms. McIntyre and I are g-going on vacation to Paris. She w-wants to walk the c-city.”
I didn’t answer. I was staring at the sunlight painted on the wall and was already half in a dream. I must have been on the ocean because the horizon was curved and I could no longer hear the grinding. I must have been dreaming because I could feel a soft sea breeze and see Gulf Stream water the color of blue you could hold in the palm of your hand.




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank magazine editor Dave Wieczorek for years of lessons, Russ and Marlene for allowing me a quiet place to write, Michael for his reading and guidance and, most of all, Lisa for her deep patience.